What I Learned

I read somewhere, that the search for perfection is the hole in the dam in which all other good things get through. This makes a painful amount of sense to me and I am immediately side stepping my behavior all month, made to see things as they are. It’s not something do well.

I went to a therapist once near the end of my time in Idaho, and she told me I had an inability to reconcile my understanding of reality with reality. There was a fancy name for my behavioral anomaly, but I never went back to see her. So I don’t know what it was. This also makes a painful amount of sense to me.

The weather has cleared and there is sun now in Vermont and it has an exacting kind of affect on my mood. Everything feels lighter, less serious, and far less deadly. The choices of this month less grave. My squandering of my time however, more apparent. I have done the very thing I swore I would not do this month: I dwelled and I drove away my good ideas, I stared out the window, and I worried about boys.

It is no secret that the person we will most frequently fail in life is ourselves. We have the most opportunity to do so, and there will be times that serve as a reminder, a water line for the rest of your life. This might be mine. I could spend the rest of my life not working, or I can get back to work. We craft a life out of what we decide is most important to us. I lost sight of that. I lost sight of everything.

I apologize to myself this morning while I meditate. I think about coffee. I think about him. I rope my mind back in. The weather is warm and the snow is gone for good and I can sit with my window open while I write and listen to the river and the birds outside and the rock in the middle that has been my rock all month is being covered today by the current.

I worry with months like this I might never be the writer I believe I could become. But, if I have learned anything this month it is that life will not wait. It will not wait or ever give you time even when, or especially when, you have given yourself time. I must face the unrelenting reality that I will have to continue to write no matter the storm, because there will always be another storm. And this is my ship, and the captain always goes down with the ship.

I believe it is true in a way I never understood before, that all one really needs to write is a room of their own. I think about a writing room in the next part of my life, and how perhaps at least a month or a season at a time I might find something like this again, and remember the importance of staying at the desk. All I really wanted was to work, and yet the world kept on giving me everything else. I think it’s a great sacrifice to teach yourself to stay in the room, while everyone else seems to be waiting outside.

2 Replies to “What I Learned”

Your writing this month leaves my throat thick with tight, unspent tears. I can’t say how many times I go back to the words. A sentence here and there will shuttle me an inch or a mile closer to my heart’s core. It feels like sad molten in there.

I just wanted to finally say a quiet “thank you”. It feels like a shy mumble, but it’s honest. Thank you for writing. Thank you for showing up for yourself and for your life, so that I can sit here and show up for mine.

Thank you for reading and thank you for reaching out. Writing is such a solitary life it is encouraging to know now and then there is someone on the other end of the line. It is never easy to listen to what our core wants, particularly when it comes in the form of radical change. Toughest one yet. Have you ever read Dear Sugar, Tiny Beautiful Things. If not, I highly endorse it.